On 1/8/2016 2:01 PM, K. Peachey wrote:
On 7 January 2016 at 22:45, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
...
I am also struck by the fact that the grant is really a very paltry one, compared to the resources the Foundation is investing in this. The MediaWiki page on Discovery[2] lists sixteen people working on this. $250,000 would hardly begin to cover their salaries.
In fact, Risker said as long ago as May last year,[3] ...
I'm not sure what the standard is for grant applications is in the US, but I know locally that is it is extremely rare that allow the funding to be used to pay for salaries and the likes, Although the grant applications I used to have common knowledge were designed to have a physical end goal as per the agreement (example: Replace kitchen cabinets in a Scout den) compared to what will be software changes.
While it depends on the purpose of the grant, for the deliverables identified in the original post it seems clear that the most natural costs to pay would be salaries in software engineering, broadly speaking. As to the comment about how the grant amount aligns with the size and salary cost of this particular team - in the grantmaking world, it is entirely normal to make awards that pay for only fractions of people's salaries. Let's say you pay for 5% of X's salary and 10% of Y's salary, and as part of the agreement those people are then expected to spend the corresponding percentage of their time dedicated to working on the grant project. I'm sure that the Discovery team has more things to work on than just this one project, but the reason the Foundation would accept this grant is presumably that it overlaps enough with what the organization wants to do anyway.
--Michael Snow